As so often, the mere rumour of 'decipherment' creates so much noise, and is so easily reduced to binary Yes/No - further messed up by the odd Voynichero's implacable determination on some theoretical narrative that the basic questions are forgotten.
First - does the hand resemble any that we find in Jewish documents of the period up until 1405?
Voynich studies is constantly obfuscated by retrospective imposition of LATER items on the primary source and the whole historical cause-and-effect issue is forgotten.
So - does the hand move like any of the attested PRE-1405 Jewish scripts?
Secondly - who says the language has to conform to liturgical standards of Hebrew? What about dialects? Written variants are often pretty grammatical Hebrew (as far as I know), but can be written in other scripts, or - more to the point - may use a form of cursive Hebrew script to record a non-Hebrew language.
What about the Karaites who (as I have mentioned) omitted many of the letters which are present in formal, liturgical, Hebrew now standard.
And then there are other historically viable possibilities - as a purely hypothetical example, let's suppose that Mar Sawma tried to communicate with the Latins in his best biblically-learned Hebrew? We could expect grammatical errors such as 'she' for 'he' and so on.
And so finally you get to the problems of translation as such. I hardly need explain how badly a text can be mangled - even/especially by Google translate.
Reading blogs written in Hindi, Russian, and even German anyone knows that the result of a poor translation into English can make the writer seem all but incoherent.
People looking for a nice-neat cipher solution are - I think - in an anchronistic dream where two people who had a common language and a common cipher key, and common (high) levels of education which provided standardised grammar and orthography put information neatly in and get precisely the same neatly-out.
If it weren't against my principles, I'd bet my house on two things: First, that if the text is ever read, it will be found not in such a cipher and secondly the whole content of the manuscript will be found to owe nothing whatever to noble courts or to central Europe.
Of course, if such a solution is ever found, I expect I'll be told to 'just ignore' it.
First - does the hand resemble any that we find in Jewish documents of the period up until 1405?
Voynich studies is constantly obfuscated by retrospective imposition of LATER items on the primary source and the whole historical cause-and-effect issue is forgotten.
So - does the hand move like any of the attested PRE-1405 Jewish scripts?
Secondly - who says the language has to conform to liturgical standards of Hebrew? What about dialects? Written variants are often pretty grammatical Hebrew (as far as I know), but can be written in other scripts, or - more to the point - may use a form of cursive Hebrew script to record a non-Hebrew language.
What about the Karaites who (as I have mentioned) omitted many of the letters which are present in formal, liturgical, Hebrew now standard.
And then there are other historically viable possibilities - as a purely hypothetical example, let's suppose that Mar Sawma tried to communicate with the Latins in his best biblically-learned Hebrew? We could expect grammatical errors such as 'she' for 'he' and so on.
And so finally you get to the problems of translation as such. I hardly need explain how badly a text can be mangled - even/especially by Google translate.
Reading blogs written in Hindi, Russian, and even German anyone knows that the result of a poor translation into English can make the writer seem all but incoherent.
People looking for a nice-neat cipher solution are - I think - in an anchronistic dream where two people who had a common language and a common cipher key, and common (high) levels of education which provided standardised grammar and orthography put information neatly in and get precisely the same neatly-out.
If it weren't against my principles, I'd bet my house on two things: First, that if the text is ever read, it will be found not in such a cipher and secondly the whole content of the manuscript will be found to owe nothing whatever to noble courts or to central Europe.
Of course, if such a solution is ever found, I expect I'll be told to 'just ignore' it.
